It’s not often that I find myself in a Catholic church. But this past weekend I happened to hear a priest deliver a noxious homily, one that sheds light on the current controversy involving the pope’s remarks on Islam.
In this homily, a priest and a Buddhist monk are trekking through the Himalayas in search of a remote monastery. Along the way they come across a stranded traveler with a broken leg, laying helplessly in some ravine and calling out for help. The Buddhist insists that they continue on, that the wounded man “just has to work it out.” (I’m sure Buddhist monks in the Himalayas speak this way.) The priest, inspired by a correct love of Jesus, argues that they must save the injured fellow’s life. At the end of the tale, the Buddhist monk gets his — he freezes to death in the snow, just before reaching his destination.
Having heard this only two days ago, I am all too aware of the tendency of Catholic officials to demean and caricature the religions of others.
The pope caused offense by quoting Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus to the effect that Mohammed gave the world “things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Slate has interesting commentaries this morning from Hitchens, Anne Applebaum and Timothy Noah. The first thing to note is the Catholic church’s historical predilection for the spread of its faith through violence. The next, as Hitchens notes, is the perniciousness of Benedict’s “steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith.”
So yes, the pope’s remarks were hypocritical and reactionary. And so are the reactions of those Muslims who long for any exuse at all to take to the streets, set fires and call for censorship or worse. As Applebaum writes, “[N]othing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism, and hatred that pours out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day of the week all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all.” Once again, as in the Danish cartoon controversy, we see Muslims objecting to characterizations of Islam as violent by carrying out violence.
It’s worth noting that Al Qaeda in Iraq has registered its disapproval of the pope’s speech. Such sensitive souls! Never do they hesitate to spill the blood and entrails of Muslims all over Mesopotamia, most recently in Kirkuk.
Comments are closed.